Is THIS Europe's Fine Wine Frontier? | Alentejo, Portugal

We've officially abandoned posh tasting rooms and studio lighting, traded them in for two wheels to pedal the untamed back roads of Portugal's Alentejo. Because this isn't just another wine region, it's Europe's last wild wine frontier. Surrounded by Roman clay pots, the planet's largest cork oak forests, and wines that consistently defy expectations, we're here to learn from the winemakers who are breaking the rules while honoring thousands of years of history. I'm Madeline Puckett, your wine nerd in chief. I wrote a New York Times bestselling book on wine and have helped millions of people find their way into wine with my brand, Wine Folly, making it genuinely way more fun to learn by drinking. And joining me on this wild ride is my teammate, David Glusman, a lifelong cyclist, expert camera wrangler, and the guy who got us out here poking in Alentejo's most secret cellars. This is Wine Folly's Mapped, and we're on a three-part adventure into the heart of Alentejo's winemaking culture. Our journey starts in southern Portugal in the city of Évora, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the best place to learn more about Alentejo's wines. Then we hit the road to visit a winery estate that's gone full sustainable. After that, we're on the bikes, riding by two local artisan workshops before climbing a hill to end the day at a fortified medieval village with the best views. The Rota do Finho's Alentejo is the perfect place to learn about and taste the region's wines. We're also meeting several winemakers here. This doesn't smell like anything I've smelled before. I don't even know how to pick a flavor. So it's a white wine with 11.5% alcohol. It's the minimum degree for the OC Alentejo Vinho de Talha. 11.5% alcohol is super low. How is this possible? Alentejo sits in southern Portugal, and it's quite hot here. But it also has a winemaking history that dates back to antiquity. And because of this, there are many native grapes, perfectly suited for the area's arid climate. The wine I'm trying features local Anteo Vaz, made in a historic vessel called a talha, a clay amphora. But elegant white wines aren't the only specialty here. So, basically this 100% Syrah, it's a monogrape wine. For me, it reminds me of dark chocolate. It's very good. What's so interesting about tasting something like Syrah in a place like Alentejo, is if you know Syrah from somewhere else, you can relate it to what it's like here, and so what's different about this area that produces Syrah. And it's a French grape, perfect in our soil, and the family of our winemaker, Tiago, were one of the first to plant this grape in Portugal. Really? It's an amazing wine. What I like about it is such an amazing amount of extraction, so you're definitely making a high-quality wine here, but it's a play between fruitiness, floral, and savory qualities. I get a little bit of black olive. Look at the legs. You can see the legs here. Well, look at that. Alentejo wine is more diverse than I thought. Alicante Bouchette, Tuerca Nacional, Aragonese, plus a little Syrah, these are the big reds, easily rivaling the world's top Cabernet. Trincadera and Alfochero offer up mouth-watering acidity, and they're often blended with the big reds to create balance and aging potential. I started calling these red blends Avanteju because they use classic Portuguese grapes in an international style. But then there's Moretto. I know my Somme buddies back home will freak out about this wine. It's elegant like Pinot Noir, but grows in the hottest climate. Finally, the white wines. Smells like pineapple and chervil and a little lemon balm. Most notably, Arinto and Antejo Vaz. Arinto is Portugal's answer to Chardonnay. It can be light, rich, aged in oak, Enox, and it has so much age-worthy potential. Antejo Vaz, on the other hand, is something distinct. That was fun. But now things are starting to get interesting. We're heading out to a famous winery in the area called Esborão, and we'll be able to see the vineyards firsthand and feel what it's like to be in one of them. I think it's good to go back around almost 20 years when we start the conversion to organic, and there is something that now we have all the property, 2,000 hectares certified as organic, and there is something that, for us, it's really important because it changed completely the way that we produce nowadays and even the culture of the company. First, we'll see the vineyards that we planted in 2011 that is an epilographic field, okay? And then we'll go to a new vineyard, too, that we planted in the last three years that is completely emerged in what we believe is the natural ambience and ecosystem in here. Each of these rows are a different variety. 189 different wine varieties grow here in the name of science, many of which I've never heard of. Some thrive with climate changes, others not so much. We continue to drive through a chaparral forest to a new vineyard separate from the rest. Its isolation protects it from disease and the forest increases biodiversity, including microflora, which helps the vineyard. Here in Alentejo, the producers have little choice than to act more sustainably because the environment here demands it. So that's the first half of the day done and now it's the serious part, bike time. Bike time! It's hot. Someone's got a bit more energy than me. I'm not sure if you can tell, but these new outfits look nice, right? Alentejo's location in Southern Portugal means it gets hot, brutally hot, and we happen to be here during a heat wave. But I am determined to keep us on schedule to learn more about the region's artisan goods, including the amazing wool fabric. My name is Luiz and we are in Regengos de Moçarás, which is the central interior of Alentejo. So we are in Fabrical, which is a very old factory that exists since 1918. And it's a factory that keeps a very old tradition from this region, which is the manual weaving of products made out of wool. In the small looms, it's about one and a half to two days. In the big loom, we have products that can take seven days to be weaved. What inspired you to work in such... It's a new business for you, but it's such an old business. What is the inspiration behind this company for you? For me, it's more like a second life. Of course, it's a completely new business. I'm coming from a completely different sector. And we got together here because basically we fell in love with this activity, with this art, because for us, this is art. And this is basically what inspired me. So having a second life, so to say, and also being able to support something that has such an important significance for this region. Artisans working 100-year-old looms and 200-year-old amphora still making wine. It's clear now. The Alentejanu see value in heritage. Made it to paint some pottery. Let's see how pottery here is made in Alenteju. This is Rui Patalum. He learned how to make pottery at age seven here in Curval, Alenteju's pottery capital. Each piece is handmade and dries slowly outside using the power of the sun. And that means summertime is the busy season. So no pressure, but you've just been tasked to draw on some pottery. What are you gonna draw? Or is it a big secret? You know, the one thing I know how to draw well, bottles and glasses, man. Grapes. I think I'm gonna do what I know how to do best. We've got Portugal. There's Alenteju. And all the major grapes, Moreto, Trincadera, Enteovage, Alicante Bouchette. Let's see what mom thinks. I have to admit, I was super proud of the design and excited to show Rui and Rui's mom since she would be painting it. She's like, all right, I'm on it. Rui's mom went right to work painting in the design. No bones about it. I hope it turns out well. Patalim will fire it in the kiln in a couple of days. So we'll get to see it finished at the end of this trip. In the meantime, there's work to be done. Yeah, a little bit of wind. Yeah. It's in the thirties right now. No joke, it's quite warm. It's toasty. A nice job on the pottery. That's pretty rad. Yeah, right? Yeah. Do what you do best. So now where are we off to? Now we're heading to Montserrat, a medieval town on the top of a hill. We just have to climb the hill. Nice breeze. What surprised you today? Well, actually more than I thought. One, the people here are awesome. They're super passionate about their place, Portugal. They're really proud. And one, the wines have all been excellent, really good. That's not a surprise. So I'm actually validated by the fact that the wine's been really good. I love seeing all the vineyards today with just full of grasses and flowers everywhere. It's a sign that it's a much more sustainable farming methods being generally used here with just grasses growing like crazy. It's probably organic or beyond organic. And it's everywhere. That was a really positive thing for me to see. Tomorrow is a very special day because we go to a part of Alentejo that is growing very ancient grapes and making wine in the old way. And we get to really dive into it. In fact, we found someone, the only person in the world who is still making Talhach. And we don't know what it's gonna be like, but I'm excited to find out. Good morning. We're on the road from Montserrat to Granja, Amaralesia to a vineyard that has this sub-region's most important wine grape. Then, staying in Alentejo's hot south, we meet the winemaker who changed everything to make top quality Alentejo red blends. And then finally, we're on the bikes on a very special off-piste route that takes us all the way to Vitaguerra, which is the spiritual home of Talhach's winemaking and the amphora workshop. Today is even hotter than yesterday. There are thousands of grapes, so what makes one worth saving? Well, this is the story with Moretu, a grape from here in Granja, Amaralesia. This is Jose Pitera. He has a tiny plot of old vine, ungrafted Moretu, and he brought his 2022 vintage made in Talhach from those exact vines. My first wine was in Talhach. Yeah, in Talhach. In Talhach do Barco. After 15 years working in wine and tens of thousands of wines tasted, this is the first time I've had Moretu, and I want to see if it holds up to the hype. Thank you. Mm, really fresh. Honestly, I'm impressed. Moretu is worth saving, hands down. It's a little like Pinot Noir and a little like Grenache, but this vineyard gets up to 136 degrees in the summer. That makes Moretu a survivor. We're lucky that people like Jose have dedicated their lives to making these wines. And now for something completely different. We're headed to Herdade de Bezo. This is one of Portugal's largest wineries that saw the potential here in Vitiguerra and started a winery here back in 1997. But they're doing something very, very different. You might've heard how alcohol levels continue to rise in wine regions around the world because of climate change, but we've heard something incredible is happening here in one of the world's hottest wine regions. For example, 2012, we bottled wines with 15.5. The new wines, we will bottle 2023 vintage between 13, 13.5. Now, Alentejo isn't getting cooler, so what changed? In 40% of our property, we are planting the old forest. Which means we, nowadays, we are having 60% with vines, the best slots, and 40% small trees, but we are working on that. By taking Alentejo's rigorous standards of sustainability to heart, Herdade de Bezo transitioned 40% of their land back to forest, and it's directly improved the quality of their wine. There we go, pretty ready, got it. So the road we just rode, for starters, for cycling, those are the types of roads you dream of. They're relatively small, pretty much no cars, undulating, left, right, lots of cool sceneries to look at, always changing. So that's super awesome. But in terms of like terroir, it was also really interesting because it went from arid, almost desert-like, and then we went over a little rise, and then, bang, big trees, everything. Trees, it was cool, the wind picked up. So that's the exact thing that we've been trying to talk about, and the fact that like, when you're in a car, you might miss that, but if you're riding a bike, you immediately notice the temperature change, for starters, and because you're going slower, you can take it in. Like, you just understand the place so much faster. I gotta say, though, whew! It's a hot day. It is toasty, yeah. It's a roasty, toasty day. After some effort, we made it to Vitiguerra and the Talia workshop. Woo! Vitiguerra! They got a Forno oven out here. I don't even think they need to bake these things. They could just put them outside. We're moving to the shade immediately. The art of making Talia was always a closely-kept secret, and as these large amphorae lost demand around the world and in Alentejo, the techniques to make them died with the last maker. Antonio Rocas is attempting to restart this lost craft. He's been experimenting, developing a special clay mix using local clay. Each Talia is very time-intensive and takes about a month to make. Then it gets fired in a large kiln that looks like a massive brick house. Seeing these amazing clay pots makes me wonder how many of our artisan skills we've lost in the endless march of time. I have to respect the work of bringing back a lost art like this, even if no one has made wine in one of these yet. To finish off our day, we stopped in a cellar just outside of Vitiguerra in a village that's been making wine since the Roman times. In fact, this cellar is so old, it was around in the ancient Roman times. So when we dig the floor, we discover that underneath half a meter of dirt, there was this original floor. And this took us, this started to take us to wonder, maybe this was a wine cellar back then, because the arches are Roman-inspired. Then we find like a clay floor with this inclination that is very well-known for wine cellars. And then we decided to take the dirt out of here and keep the original floor. So when we did this, we discovered this here. So this is basically another taglia that is buried in there, and that was already in here. So if you look into the inclination of the floor, the floor shows that this is the lower point of the wine cellar. And this is because back then, if a taglia would break during fermentation, then the wine would flow and they would save it in there. This is called the tif taglia, and this is exactly the concept. The concept was to keep the wine that otherwise would have been lost. We're at Quinta de Parral. It is a winery and guest accommodation hotel. Very fancy. And this place is outstanding. Dare I say, one of the nicest places I've ever stayed in. But tomorrow there's more. We're heading up to Redondo, where we're riding from the Serra de Ossa. This is a mountain range that really controls the influence of the climate in the region. And I've heard there's actually an ancient megalith on the path on our way there, and we're gonna try to see if we can find it. Just stopped at a supermarket as our starting point today. As you can see, we've got the bikes ready. Madeline's getting some photography gear ready. It's supposed to be like 37 degrees today, which is pretty toasty. So we're just trying to start a little bit earlier and save ourselves from this. Ah, sun! Today we're embarking on one of our biggest rides, climbing the Serra de Ossa. We're riding in an area that's famous for its Montato cork forests and rich marble deposits, and the wines are connected to both. So we'll be picking up two wines for a blind tasting at the end of the day in Estremoche. I heard Alentejo has the highest concentration of Neolithic structures in Europe. Dolmens and minhurs scatter the region in fields and on hills. And our route takes us very close to one. I wanna try to find it. It might be on this hill. I don't know if we go that way. There's no sign or anything. It's just a dirt road that seems to get worse and worse as I go up it. I see it! Here it is. I seem to have lost David. I got excited because I saw this. The dolmen tube or altas date back 7,000 years and the door always faces east to the sunrise. It's beautiful. Back on the road again. Now we're climbing the Cerradosa. The Cerradosa may look small, but they do critical work in pulling cool air from the Atlantic Ocean over 70 miles away. We're running late to our next winery appointment, so. What? Late? We were riding so fast. We got the van to load the bikes. Onward! We're headed to the Cork Forest next. I'm super excited. Pedro, nice to meet you. Welcome to Morchal. Hi! That's Madeline. Hi, Madeline. Hey! Nice to meet you. How are you? Welcome. Thank you. Ian at Gerda de Morchal put out quite the lunch spread, picnic style, next to their famed Alicante Bouchette vineyards. So this is really the flagship of who we are. This is Morchal. It's a brand, as it were, my grandfather first bottled in 1949, and he gave it this image in 1954, which is still an iconic vintage in Portugal. It was a real reference, a national reference in those days. The wine is delicious, and we're here to learn more about the Cork Forests, which Ian tells us really expanded during the 1400s. The corks really started proper 1850s, 1860s. Corks come from the bark of cork trees. And that effectively is where the corks come from. So they're just punched that way. And then what you're looking for is you don't want too many of these stripes here. As we walked through the forest, we noticed the trees were numbered. What the four means, it actually refers as a sort of 10-year cycle for stripping. So this would have been stripped, last stripped in 2014, that's what the four is. So this is gonna be stripped with 12 years. Normally the legal minimum is nine years. We like to stretch it out to about 10 or 11 on average, mostly for climate change reasons and not to put the trees under too much stress in the hot summer months. So we give them an extra year. Can you tell me why there's a white lines on some of the oak trees, the cork oaks here? All cork oaks belong to the Portuguese state. So no landowner owns the cork trees on their property. It actually belongs to the government. And so whenever you want to fell a tree for whatever reason, it's dying, it's dried out, you need to paint a little white line around it and get authorization to knock it down. We're free to do what we like when it comes to planting. We've planted 47,000 trees here in the last five years, four or five years. But when it comes to knocking them out, you need government authorization, which is really important. It's been really important in helping preserve the cork forest since the revolution years because that's when this law came in, which is roughly from 75 onwards. Cork has been an integral part of wine for half a millennia. And that means Alentejo has been connected to all the wines in the world, in a way, through these cork forests. Estromoge is the marble capital of Alentejo, complete with an ancient marble castle that you can actually book a room in. Yes, that's exactly what we did. The truth is marble is a big deal in Alentejo. There is a marble industry here with amazing marble products, but it actually has an effect on the wines as well. And since we need to learn about wine in a fun way, why not make it a fun challenge? We picked up a wine from Donna Maria. The winery has a century old marble lagar where the wines are foot trodden still to this day. Thick cut marble like this for agricultural use is not something you see anymore. This is a special winery estate. Then we went to a vineyard covered in marble stones. Joao Portugal Ramos made a single wine from this amazing marble soil vineyard. I think we'll be able to taste how marble soils affect the flavor in the wine. One of these wines is made with the marble soils. So the grapes grow out of marble soils. And how is that gonna have an effect on the wine? Well, I think I can blind taste these wines. All right, guys, here's the deal. We'll kick Madeline out of here. She doesn't know which is which. So this guy is the ones that have marble in the vineyard, like right next to the actual wines that are growing. And then this one is the one that is made in marble lagars. Soil, production. All right, I really wanna take a look at the color of these wines because I think that's my first hint. Both of these wines should be very extracted and really deep in color because of the amount of Alicante Bouchette in each of them. But marble soils, I think, are gonna be kind of sandy and gravelly, which means the water's gonna rush through, which helps increase aromatics and actually reduces a little bit of color in a wine. One of them's definitely darker than the other one. So that's maybe my biggest clue. Another thing that might tell me which one's which is on the nose of this wine. The aromatics in a wine with clay soils are gonna be richer and bolder, and the aromatics with a more gravelly, sandy, maybe marble soil, might be more aromatically, floral, that kind of a thing. So let's find out on the nose. Whoa, wow. This one is super aromatic. The last thing I think marble soils are gonna do is they're gonna lift the flavor of the wine. And what I mean by that is there should be pretty good acidity and it should be a little lighter bodied than a wine in clay soils. Let's find out. Really bright acidity and somewhat light. This one's a doozy. So I think this is the wine made in the marble soils and this is the wine made in Ligar. Did I get it right? Oh! Yeah! Oh my God. Wow. I got it right. I can't believe it. I couldn't believe it. Nice work, Madeline. That's wild. Wow. Cool. Let's go drink these wines. Sounds good. Our journey in Alentejo is nearly over, but you said we can't miss Puerto Alegre. So here we are on the bikes again on our last day headed to our biggest climb of the trip, the road to Marval. I'm so glad we went here. If I would have missed this, I wouldn't have seen all of what this area has to offer. I always knew Portugal just generally as being pretty powerful, big wines. Mostly red wines is what I've experienced in Canada, where I'm based. And here we had a full experience from light, zippy, refreshing whites to white varieties that we don't normally see all that often and a bunch of fortified wines too, which are not port. And that was really fun to try as well. I'd never experienced those wines before and they're fantastic. The wine world is full of posh tasting rooms and big brands, but Alentejo, at its best, offers something that's quite the opposite, a treasure trove of undiscovered wine varieties and super fine wines for those willing to trust their palate. And remember the Portuguese pottery project we did on day one? Check this out. It turned out awesome. I hope you enjoyed this adventure in Alentejo. And if you did, please leave us a comment and let us know or share this with somebody who might like it. And as always, until next time, happy tasting. Peace out.